4 - Moral Accountability and Collective Action

Summary

INTRODUCTION

We turn now to the central issue: individual moral accountability in the context of collective action. The most important and far-reaching harms and wrongs of contemporary life are the products of collective actions, mediated by social and institutional structures. These harms and wrongs are essentially collective products, and individual agents rarely make a difference to their occurrence. So long as individuals are only responsible for the effects they produce, then the result of this disparity between collective harm and individual effect is the disappearance of individual accountability. If no individual makes a difference, then no individual is accountable for these collective harms. And since institutions and social groups consist ultimately in nothing but individual agents, no one is accountable for what we do together.

The disappearance of individual accountability is both a description of our current state and a predicament whose practical and theoretical dimensions I have already indicated in Chapter 1. The following three chapters treat this problem. The present chapter and Chapter 5 discuss the moral accountability of individuals for harms that are the result of jointly intentional action, or what I will call structured collective action. Chapter 6 then extends the discussion to collective harms that are not the product of jointly intentional action: cases of facilitation, when one individual aids others in their wrong without intentionally promoting that wrong; and cases of environmental harms, which are the products of the unconcerted actions of many individuals.

Section 4.2 introduces the problem of overdetermined, collective wrongdoing, in the context of certain commonsense principles of individual moral accountability.